How to Spark a Snowcrash, & What the Web Really Does

In a lot of ways, we all just pulled each other up to a new frequency, I think. We’ve been sharing our ideas and perspectives of our personal discoveries for a while now, and all of a sudden all these perspectives assembled into an insight that helped me understand why the human network is so important, and why building a personal ‘trust network’ is critical for moving forward in society. (For anyone new here, check out An Idea Worth Spreading post and comment thread as an orientation to this site and the thinking going on here.)

So the past few days have been spent thinking about what just happened, and how we can keep doing it.

I have realized what’s happening here is that this blog has become a public learning community, where we are all literally learning how to learn. We are learning how to think in this new way. This new way of thinking, this ‘network thinking,’ by default requires a network. We can’t learn how to think in the new way alone. We can only figure it out through experimentation and collaboration. This is the “shift” everyone is talking about, the big thing that individuals and organizations “need” to operate in the 21st Century. We’re revealing it, unfolding it, right now, together.

My takeaway of what this means and how to do it:

1. Create a personal ‘trust network’ for yourself first.

In order to understand the implications of the shift and to internalize it, you need to experience it firsthand. You can’t tell your organization that you’re going to be implementing “social media” and everyone is going to start “collaborating,” and assume that waving a magic wand is going to make this happen. My experience has been that I had to learn what trusting and sharing means on my own.

That really sounds bizarre, and I feel a bit subhuman that it took me so long to relearn how to trust someone and share resources. It’s what we’re taught as children, but apparently society does a good job beating it out of us.

All of us have a trust network already “in real life.” It’s your family and your close friends and colleagues, all those strong ties, and also your extended family, community, and coworkers, your weak ties. These people are crucial, they are your companions day to day. But what about people beyond your real life connections? Is there a way to extend our connections and build trust with strangers who have a diversity of backgrounds, skills, strengths, resources, and knowledge? People who could help us if we needed help? Could we establish a global trust network?

What I discovered through Twitter was that there are people out there who know what community means. Who really, truly know. These people have already internalized what a society could look like based on a cooperative model, and it seems that this is what’s really going on on the web. Beyond all the superficial stuff out there, all the mindless entertainment and porn, at the core (or maybe at the periphery) is a community of….thousands?….millions?….of people who have jobs and careers and passions that they carry out “in the real world,” but have already embraced the vision of a much different way of life that is based in trust.

And they are modeling it online.

What is actually happening on the web is an epic experiment in creating a new society.

When you hear people talk about this online “gift economy,” and “building value and trust,” and “sharing” – this is WAY beyond a new gimmick for your business. Please don’t underestimate what’s going on. This is actually people laying down the foundation and infrastructure for a new global economy. There is a movement that is slowly gaining steam as people are “waking up,” and it has the potential to change the world.

That thing you think about before you go to sleep at night, when you say “sigh, if only the world was a little more like ___” – that thing is actually going on right now. It’s terrifying and magical, because it means that there is hope. It means that we don’t have to stand by and let the economy and education and government all erode and crumble around us as we watch from the sidelines. There’s the opportunity to actually get involved, take charge of our own lives, and join in the experiment and see how to make it a reality. How to make it THE reality.

The beauty of the complexity of it is that in order to really reap the benefits of it, you have to participate in it genuinely, and in order to participate genuinely, you have to do it intentionally, and in order to do it intentionally, you have to understand it, and in order to understand it, you have to understand yourself, and in order to understand yourself, you have to learn how to give, and in order to learn how to give, you have to establish a network to give to.

It’s a complex interrelated web, but it seems that establishing the network is a first step.

2. Share yourself.

This is the part where mindfulness comes in, and where you really have to start exploring the depths of personal Identity.

That’s a lot to ask, and you may not have even asked yourself that question in a while. That’s the point. If you were really going to live in a trust-based society – what would that look like? Who would you be?

There’s a big path of self-discovery and self-reflection that goes on, there’s a lot of confronting your beliefs and your ego, and it’s painful sometimes.

For me, that is kind of the beauty of the web. It can help you to help yourself, if you choose to use it to that end.

And the way that “it” helps you, is that PEOPLE help you. It’s the people. It’s always been about the people.

Why has our society become so jaded, so selfish, so afraid, so arrogant, so egotistical, and so greedy?

I think it’s because our society doesn’t give us many chances to share ourselves with each other. To really let our guards down and just be authentic, good people, who are not out for gain, who are not out to exploit each other in order to get ahead, but who just want to be able to freely exchange gifts and collaborate because it makes us feel good.

Society doesn’t want this. You want to know why?

Because these things are free.

What does society reward? Cheating. Stealing. Exploitation. Fame. Big houses. Fancy cars. Executive titles. Material stuff. All these things are attached to something else. Something has to be sacrificed to get these things. And they often don’t make you happy in the end. They’re not who you really are, or what you really care about, but you do them because that’s how it’s set up, and we’re just operating within the framework that exists.

But, there’s this other way.

In this experimental society in which you can participate, if you want – people are a little more “real.” People will give you advice, pass along a link they think might interest you, offer to collaborate on a real project, or exchange some information with you, for no other reason besides that it’s “how THIS system works.”

The precondition is trust. You can’t buy trust. You can’t force trust.

You earn trust.

You earn it by sharing your gifts. I don’t know how to tell you what yours is. It took me years of exploration to find mine, but I can say from my firsthand experience on the web, that my trust network pulled me forward into the realm where I made the discovery. The search for self-identity that I’ve been on my life was actually aided by real people around the planet who I’ve never actually met.

The process of self-discovery is of course completely personal. I can only tell you that for me, starting this blog was one of my greatest tools. Writing my thoughts was a powerful way for me to practice thinking about what I think, and critically evaluate myself. The even better part is when other people started leaving comments on my posts, challenging the way I think, offering their perspectives, and making me rethink what I thought I knew. These conversations have been evolving for months, but each blog post resulted in people leaving comments that challenged my thinking further and further. Sometimes people disagreed with me, and sometimes I wanted to lash out and defend my thinking.

But instead, I tried to understand that other person’s perspective, see where they’re coming from, and imagine why they might think what they think. I tried to learn empathy. I think empathy is a critical emotion to develop in a trust society, and also a necessary one to help bring about ‘the shift.’

The learning process that takes place during this self-discovery isn’t just a discovery of self, but the discovery of self in relation to others. The thinking process becomes one that can encompass the idea of interdependence. I don’t know how to explain this, but I can only say this “new way of thinking” involves a transcendence of ego. It is a mental model that assumes that problems cannot be solved alone, and that collaboration is not just desirable, but is actually a display of higher intelligence.

When you are able to put your ego aside, and realize that problems can only be solved by many, your mentality shifts from “I know the answer” to one of “How can I contribute to the solution?”

For me, when this started, it felt like a video game. I would send people links, or retweet people’s stuff that seemed useful, and when I got a “thank you,” it caused a little high. People were appreciating my contributions. When people would comment on my blog posts or retweet my posts to their networks, it caused a little high again, because again I was being appreciated.

As you start sharing more of yourself and your ideas, your art, your gifts, your insights, people will start to notice. You don’t have to try to “sell yourself.” You have to try to BE yourself.

There’s a difference. And the difference gets noticed.

And the shift starts to creep into your brain, as this behavior becomes reinforced over and over and over again.

Every time someone shows you some appreciation for being you, even something as small as a retweet, a different kind of synapse starts firing in the brain.

We start getting rewarded for giving and for sharing.

We get rewarded for being our authentic self.

It starts to build self-confidence and self-esteem in a strangely gratifying way, because all you’re doing is kind of having a good time, and just being yourself.

Just keep doing this.

3. Rewire your brain

In order to function in this new society, what it comes down to is that you need to kickstart your brain.

Beyond all the fun and giving and sharing is an actual restructuring of the way the brain works. We have to teach our brains how to process the type of information that now needs to be processed. Digital information. Information that has a place it needs to go in order to be useful. We are problem solvers, but we are also transmitters. We need to build a new brain.

This new brain is intuition based.

I actually think it’s not a new brain at all, but the ‘real’ brain. I think what happens is that we start to unlearn some things, and then rediscover how the optimal brain actually functions.

I have read quite a bit of research on complexity science, evolutionary theory, neuroscience, and really so much more, so this isn’t coming from a place of being uninformed, but there’s something different about this brain.

Because it’s intuition based, it defies description. It doesn’t think hierarchically or in a linear way, instead it operates in patterns. It happens seemingly instantaneously. It happens through intention.

Someone gave me the example of reaching out for a glass. Do you think about all the muscles and movements involved in moving your arm, or do you simply have an intention for your hand to grasp the glass?

I think what’s happened to us is we have trained our brains to operate like machines for 100 years. We have been working in jobs that have set descriptions, with specific tasks and roles, and they box in our mind. I think our minds have actually struggled to form the linear paths to think in the linear way that typical organizations want us to operate in; following directions, following rules, doing repetitive tasks, regurgitating information.

But the brain doesn’t want to work like that. It wants to work like a network. It wants to send ideas and information all over the place, jumping from synapse to synapse on multiple pathways. It wants to be contextual, relational, adaptive, and non-linear. It wants to imagine things, map new models, and revise itself constantly. I think it WANTS to be a learning machine. As we pick up on new ways of thinking about things and assembling information, new synapses form, helping information reach it’s destination faster and more effectively.

I started to think about the brain this way by watching the way information travels on Twitter. This was a huge help in shifting my thinking. I imagined each person as a node in a network, even imagining the people out there who I wasn’t following. I tried to imagine EVERYONE who’s on Twitter. All the humans around the world. I imagined we each operated as a switch and a filter.

As a switch, we each can decide where to allow information to spread into our network. (Keep toggling this example between how Twitter works and how the brain’s neural nets work)

When we retweet, we expose our entire network of relationships to this particular piece of information. That’s like flipping the switch “on.” It fires the synapse. Or we can take no action, and the tweet just passes through the stream. The switch stayed “off.”

In addition, we can also be a filter. We can add extra data to a tweet, leaving a short comment about it, or cc’ing specific people on it, or just sending it directly to people.

As we become more familiar with who we’re following and who’s within our human network, we individually get better at being a switch and a filter.

We become more discriminatory about what to tweet, what to retweet, and where to send information.

Like the brain that forms new pathways for effectiveness, we also learn to more effectively move information.

I think that the act of doing this in itself trains the brain. It teaches the brain to recognize itself. It’s like you giving your brain permission to operate the way you’re modeling the movement of information in Twitter. Your tweets don’t get seen by the same people after every tweet, and you never know who is going to pick up your tweet and send it to their network. If the person is influential, they can cause a huge number of people to see your tweet, sending along all kinds of new and unexpected pathways. But the travel of a tweet is kind of random – you can’t predict exactly where it will go or who will combine it with some other novel piece of information, it’s just this organic process.

Now the interesting thing is when you stop thinking about tweets, and stop thinking about the screennames that are retweeting tweets.

Instead, think that you are sending an important piece of information. And think that your network isn’t “Twitter”, it’s human beings who need certain information in order for them to be able to solve problems. And then assume that you’ve got a pretty good read on the human beings within your personal network, and you have a pretty good intuition about who you should send that information to in order for it to get to where you think it needs to go and be seen and processed in order for it to have the most impact.

Now you’re operating intelligently.

My little snowcrash was understanding this process of information travel. It’s non-hierarchical, fluid, organic, and unpredictable. But it’s a lot closer to how the brain wants to function than the way we usually use it.

I think that by observing how information moves in Twitter, by literally SEEING it, watching it, observing, we can teach the brain to recognize itself, and jumpstart this shift process.

It’s said that “two neurons that fire together, wire together.”

This is the snowcrash. It’s the moment that a new connection, a new pathway, is forged in the brain. Or maybe many pathways. Maybe a whole new network of pathways. Maybe that ‘lightening bolt’ feeling is really what it looks like, just a ton of new pathways blazing across your brain.

At any rate, once your brain locks in this new set of pathways, you’re in.

Now you’re ready to start doing some reeaaalllllly interesting things.

I think this might be the way innovation works. It might be the way idea generation works. It might be the way creativity works. It’s allowing the hierarchical thinking to loosen it’s grip on your brain, and let it do what it wants to do. I think it will start jumping in these non-lateral patterns and joining up ideas that you would have never thought to join before, because you have a whole new set of pathways to connect them.

And if your individual brain starts acting like that, and then you tune up your whole organization to that frequency and have a network of minds operating in this non-lateral way…….. well……… the combined intelligence of a network like that seems pretty radical.

Conclusion

I wanted this to be an abridged version of the last post, but it seems like it’s gotten pretty lengthy as well. I’m looking forward to your perspectives on the way I’m interpreting what happened, and for those that have had a similar experience, please share your version of how it happened and how you think the process can be accelerated.

I think our capacity to learn and grow is going to skyrocket once we start experimenting with building these new paths in the brain.

build a web of relationships, of alliances, with people who will help us to grow and learn

initiate the process of self-discovery and self-awareness / mindfulness, and learn to share, trust and empathize

intentionally rewire the brain through watching its behavior modeled in the way information travels on Twitter

The other component that I’m going to cover in the next post is Dialogue.

I’ve thought a lot on this, and the thing that’s missing from this formula is the spoken word.

I’ll get into the concept of orality and generative dialogue, but I think this is the other critical component for us to learn and challenge our minds. We have to engage in spoken “debate,” in a mutually respectful way, to share the way we understand things with others, and then get their perspectives and insights. Some of my greatest growth has happened during conversations that go late into the night, where my mind is stretched to new levels.

I generated what seems like a potentially powerful way to do this publicly online so many can learn at once, which evolved out of my thoughts for starting a Junto.

114 thoughts on “How to Spark a Snowcrash, & What the Web Really Does”

Precise as usual. I admire your ability to string all the words together. Personally I love 140 chrs. Whenever I try to string longer stuff together it just rambles and rambles. For me it’s starting to get to let my fingers do the talking. But that works best in 140 characters.

For me, you’ve outlined a good description of the twitter experience. What I want to put on the table is that it also is very close to the experience of living in a lively urban area. Family and friends are different from neighbors in a couple of important ways. The most important I think is that there is an expectation of entanglement going forward. The very fact that children don’t want to disappoint parents and parents don’t want to hurt their children makes easy conversation very complicated. Words have to be weighed carefully. Precise language is taken as “brutal” honesty. It leads to the necessity of white lies.

A neighbor is different. The rule is be a “good neighbor”. The expectation is not “to be friends.” The problem with new friends is that there is a going forward risk of time that has to be spent. The possible risk of having to either spend time or say no tends to discourage forming new friendships. At least for me.

At some point or other I did a snarky tweet . In responds to a follow me on Facebook tweet, I tweeted something like ” I don’t do Facebook cause I don’t want any new friends.” The point is friends take time. I would rather spend my time on the friends I already have and following my interest. (To be I no longer have a day job. It makes a HUGE difference.)

The point I’m ambling towards is that the very ability to not have to make friends to exchange an idea, a pleasantry, a joke or just a Hey! makes twitter the closest thing I’ve ever experienced to walking to the store, nodding to the guy at the Coffee Shop, stopping at the Fruit Stand to pick up my coffee and cigarettes, standing in front of the bookstore window for a minute or two. Human contact without human obligations. Very nice.

The new very big deal is that once the convos and interactions are on the web, informal exchanges can be stored and time shifted. The ability to see live informal exchanges is very new. But it’s important to keep in mind that the informal exchanges have been the stuff of human life since the Monkeys learned to talk and make tools and art.

these are really good insights that give me some clarity as to what i’m trying to say, and i’ve sensed this very same dynamic. the web is just a simulated environment that mirrors the kind of interaction we have in the real world.

i think most of us aren’t realizing just how similar it is.

of course it’s different to be face to face than typing and looking at a screen, but the point is that in either case, the thing on the other end is another human being, it’s just sometimes hard to see past the “technology” and recognize the people.

it’s this huge informal world, where you can be like a flaneur, just checking out what people are talking about and doing and thinking about.

in a way, it’s like sitting outside at a cafe and just people watching (one of my favorite activities, actually), except in this case, there’s just more metadata.

Great points in the post, and I think Michael hits on one of the key paradoxes with divergent thinking. In order to make that thinking more valuable, you have to pull it back into a coherent narrative. Venessa does this particularly well.

If our brains were to work like twitter, I fear they’d constantly just spin off into wonderland and never come back to the tasks at hand: surviving and thriving.

Pulling all this tangentially related info something concise and coherent is I’m working on, but am far from mastering. I need to set up rules and do a lot of pruning. It’s the branching, and then pruning of new ideas into a coherent piece or a coherent product: that’s the magic.

This may launch you into a new agey realm you’re not comfortable with, but I think you’re touching on the edges of Buddhism with your description of the new brain and the new, networked behaviour. Mindfulness, defeating ego and overcoming material attachment. What’s the concept of no-self and interconnectedness, if not the collective mind?

Venessa’s beautiful post is not ‘on the edges of Buddhism’ it is right on it. In addition, Buddha also prescribed the following three rules for training of the mind (brain):

a) Self study but keep it ‘no mind’ state
b) Have a select group to discuss and learn — dialogue — but limits itself to selecting a ‘response’ from a variety of choices that open up — not to transcend the opposing views to form a superior response (that would have truly created an emergent design).
c) Have a mentor

i have definitely referred to what’s happening as the meeting of science & spirit, a kind of Techno-Buddhism. i don’t see it as a bad thing. use technology tools to connect + be a good person = good rule of thumb

1. Honored to be part of this. Your discoveries as they happen help me find words for concepts that otherwise would remain fuzzy.

2. Society does not want this? I think this is an apparency, with parallels easier to observe in hierarchical organizations. If the vision, objectives, and metrics include thrival for all, the virtual organism thrives better, within market and environmental constraints.

3. How empowering to experience that information we want does find us. Twitter is just one servo mechanism for conscious thinking as a group. Blogs, wikis, even e-mail, though mail (or phone) requires us to know or intuit who needs what information when. That is good for focus. Fuzzy media are good for open sharing, spreading ideas and letting people find what they need for their next discovery.

I agree with a lot of what you have here, but I don’t agree with the notion of “intent.”

The vast majority of the people acting as neurons and nodes in the Great Internet Brain have no idea what role they play. There is no Grand Design, only a small number of actors who are convinced they know where this is headed and share a vision.

Likewise, there are more than a couple who are worried about that very result, with the implications for the loss of individualism.

I’ve read and studied about chaos, complexity, emergent order, Hayek, Hofstadter, Wolfram and the like. And I think they would appreciate how you’ve tied back to their observations (both anecdotal and experimental.) I don’t know that at any of those levels there has ever been a requirement for Intention to precede Result. Outcomes are what they will be, and it is the Fatal Conceit indeed that we should claim to know the order that would emerge from such a rich system of non-linear parts feeding back on one another.

Perhaps the story is that “intent” starts at the scale of the individual/ family evolves to the scale of the tribe. In the West it then took a linguistic leap to the Nation State although in real life that was a word that didn’t point to a living reality. Maybe what we are seeing now is that the real world of exchange no longer needs the formal rules of the Nation State. As exchange happens separate from the Nation State it’s possible to get a more realistic set of words.

Consider that real life happens in cities and their bio regions. When cities and bio regions can get the feedback info to inform going forward risk/benefit decisions it might make sense to speak of their intent.

One possible path is that as bio regions become “intentional” at different speeds and different times, a global “intentionality” might evolve.

Thanks for your view. So, I think the way I’m looking at it is that we all have intention all the time. As you say ‘the vast majority of people have no idea what they play in the internet brain’ –

one thing that is really important, that I’m sorry if it wasn’t made clear, is that what I’m talking about actually has nothing to do with the internet. I’m trying to frame this in a way that isn’t about the “techie” stuff, the tools, that makes what we’re talking about distracting. What we’re talking about is people. Real people. The internet is just an advanced telephone in this case, it’s not a “place”, it’s not a “brain” – it’s just the means of allowing two people to communicate. the difference is that it’s more than 2 people, it’s many people, and the richness of the interface is better than just a phone.

So the talk about intention is just talking about people who doing things purposefully. This is not a loss of individualism at all, it’s quite the opposite. It’s people still doing the stuff they do, but with a little more focus.

Let me try to give a metaphor that came to mind. So, imagine you’re in a new city, and you think to yourself “i want a coffee, i’m going to go find a coffee shop.” These are the kinds of thoughts that occur all the time, it’s an intention, it’s something you’re planning on getting. It’s not magic, it’s just you making a decision about something. So, you start walking around the streets, and eventually you find a coffeeshop and you’re all set.

Now, what if you had stopped by the tourism office when you got there first, and picked up a map. Then when you decided you wanted a coffee, you could check out the map, and go directly to the coffeeshop because you knew how to get there.

So either way you get there, one method is just more efficient.

Maybe another example, but business related. Actually, this one might make even more sense, and answer the ‘individuality’ question.

Imagine some new information comes down from corporate, and it’s your responsibility to make sure everybody in the organization gets the update and integrates the information into their procedures. In version one, you print off the info, place it in a big stack in the breakroom, and make an announcement “hey everyone, grab one of those papers and read it.” maybe some people didn’t hear you, others forget, or whatever, and not everyone gets the memo.

Now what if the information is delivered directly to the individual’s desk, or maybe delivered directly via email, or better yet delivered and then you discuss it with your coworkers, decided what it means for the way you do your job, if it makes sense, and how much importance to assign to it.

In both cases, the employee might get the memo, and might take it seriously. In both cases, it does end up being up to the individual to decide what to do with the information (this is the individuality part). It’s a personal decision of how to use the information given to you.

This example actually works really well in my mind. When I was a district manager, I oversaw operations at five stores across the state of Michigan. Some managers “got it,” and others really struggled. I would have these collaborative manager meetings once a month, where I took all 5 of them out to lunch, and we’d review our numbers, talk about setting the next month’s budget, discuss performance of the employees. We had a chance for everyone to share what works for them together.

Some really benefitted from this, others didn’t seem to integrate the advice or tips of how to run a store for effectively, and continued to struggle.

So, in that case I think it comes down to a choice, and also proficiency. They have to want to improve the organization, and in order to improve the organization, they often had to improve themselves. Often the problems they were having with their staff were the problems they were actually having with themselves. They were struggling in their management role, and the rest of the team suffered.

Maybe they intended to do well, but somehow they were missing the big picture of how to do it. Maybe they were missing that ‘mental map’ that gave them insight into how to run an organization, that “systems thinking” viewpoint. Maybe they just weren’t cut out for the job.

So I think what I’m describing here is actually like a system thinking point of view, when I say rewiring the brain. I am describing it in terms of a network, but a network is a complex system, so they’re a similar concept, said different ways.

I flashed on the notion that the network is a threat to individuality. I hear that complaint often, but I have to believe that it is founded on a false sense of individuality, one developed in the industrial age to render individuals into discrete political, social, economic entities. It is a strong, dualistic fiction that insists that one is either an individual or a faceless, nameless part of the herd. We Americans love this fiction, as it’s the basis of our business and our movies. We all want to be gunslingers and high plains drifters, not the nameless townspeople.

Perhaps we needed this fiction to move beyond feudalism, but I think we are arrived at a place in history where this fiction has lost its usefulness and has become a hinderance. I think Venessa is pointing to a new fiction, a new model for understanding and organizing ourselves, and in this new fiction one can be an individual only within the context of the network, or rhizome, to use Deleuze and Guattari’s term. Venessa points to this new model when she writes: “The learning process that takes place during this self-discovery isn’t just a discovery of self, but the discovery of self in relation to others.” Self in relation to others. This, I think, will be the fiction that drives culture through the next hundred years, and it in no way implies a loss of self. Rather, it implies the investment of self with more meaning and value than the self could ever hope to attain on its own.

I’m an English teacher, so language metaphors occur to me most easily. I can understand this self in relation to others by thinking of the period at the end of this very sentence. <– just there, so slight as to be missed in the herd of other marks on this page, just one dot among many others, and yet, this one dot must maintain its individual integrity if it is to achieve any meaning at all, not elongating into a , or a j, but standing up, asserting its grammatical role, its individual identity, and shouting (not as an exclamation point would shout, but shouting nonetheless), “Dammit, I’m going to stop this runaway sentence,” and so it does. <– just there. To achieve this grammatical miracle, the period, the dot, must maintain its individuality, but that individuality means very little all by itself. Just place the period by itself:

.

See? It means almost nothing. It's just a silly little dot.

I think most of us are just silly little people all by ourselves. Only within the context of the network can we assert our individualities, and only within the context of the network do those individualities acquire meaning and value. The emergence of the worldwide network has made explicit and has extended the structures always at work within small social groups. And that really does create something quite new. Venessa is capturing that something new, and that's what's attracting us all to this conversation.

To pick up on the buddhist strain in this conversation, Buddhists say that we must lose the ego, transcend the ego, and Westerners are horrified at the loss of what they have defined as Self. The Buddha just smiles, having found himself.

Sorry for the late reply, but life has a way of getting in between my keenest thoughts and their actual publication.

The Internet angle might be the Red Herring here. What the Internet HAS done for research and philosophy of connectivity is give us enough of a real-time element to see more patterns of sharing and transmission. But you are right, that the re-wiring of behaviors doesn’t need a T1 line at all.

What I was getting at in the previous comment was the idea that as nodes, axons or whatever role we play in the larger construct, we don’t need to “intend” to do anything. The aggregate body will display a rich and complex behavior beyond anything we can know.

Here’s an example: anthills.

The individual ants are actually programmed with a handful of simple rules governing proximity, likelihood to follow, smell, and a couple of other factors. From that comes behavior that when enacted on the individual level shows no deep intelligence.

Yet when a half-million ants exhibit the behavior, they build an anthill that serves to defend, communicate, and provide group identity.

Much in that same way, the living society – built by all of the connections we’ve made and choose to reinforce – has a richness and complexity we don’t see. An intelligence we can’t begin to grasp, because it speaks a language from a frame of reference we can’t address. We’re hopelessly stuck in our own lens.

But unlike every creature before us, we KNOW we are stuck in that lens, and while we may never approach the Societal Brain, we can learn what we can from the patterns we can perceive internally.

Ike, yes, and those patterns are in how the brain works. As well as yes, Kieth, these patterns are in how our language works to structure the thinking strategies and content of thoughts we’re most likely to put into our favored patterned ways. Of course, other futurists (pre-thinkers?) have noticed these patterns from self-observation, long before brain research verified them. Now that brain research exists to back up these empirical observations, we’re starting to notice a pattern enough to be able to describe it without the cultural content – because we’re seeing the expression of it in so many “unrelated” areas.

Those who were “before their time” on this topic exist, because it’s as “old as dirt.” It is also true that this started happening “without intent” on a much larger scale than almost anyone but a handful of people could spot. But there are people who have seen far before this moment – who already got busy dedicating their lives to its development – and died. As a result that they were, in a sense, looking at the same arena, there is quite a bit their ideas have in common. Of course, they expressed it uniquely.

Here’s few who I have taken the time to learn about first-hand…the most similar to what you’ve been talking about is David Bohm, who came up with an idea he called “Dialogue.” (Similar to how Vanessa is curious if a larger “Junto” can be designed.) Bohm’s experiment is a fascinating model for how people come to know each other in social situations. The freedom of Dialogue also reveals core values, motives and other indicators of how specific people would react, if working on a project. (An interesting online conversation website that I’ve been participating in has http://www.pandalous.com – but that arena is still limited to people who write with a computer and do not interact personally, other than to correspond.) The in-person experience of David Bohm’s Dialogue groups are amazing and can be seeded in any community…and Dialogue results in the community bonding together.

I believe that David Bohm style Dialogue outlines the social arena of the work that F.M. Alexander did in a more personal arena. F.M.’s Alexander Technique deals with human reaction while directing intent during movement – how to continue learning indefinitely and “keep the brain empty” as Dibyendu De suggests. Both Dialogue and Alexander Technique have quite a bit in common with the work of creative thinkers, such as Edward de Bono. This author, (still alive) had the distinction of successfully predicting the way the brain works, (in his book “Mechanism of Mind,” written before the research was available to back up his models.) Still designing, de Bono comes up with ways to compensate for the brain design limitations such as argument and linear thought. (He invented the concept of “lateral thinking.” I’m part of his social networking site at debonosociety.com)

Generalists like Ben Franklin and Leonardo di Vinci have fallen out of fashion in our rapidly aging era of independence and specialization. The myopic specialists will the last to know what is going on, and may even fight changes. Specialists still have no idea of the meanings us generalists point to in these “coincidental” parallels between religions, the art of training, psychologists, physicists, artists, mind-body disciplines, project managers, negociators, and even career counselors such as Barbara Sher.

For instance, I had attended a talk on string theory. When I asked the person giving the talk for examples how the science of this content could be expressed in other disciplines, he looked at me blankly. I suggested a book published in 1992 by Mararet J. Wheatley; “Leadership and the New Science – Learning about Organization From An Orderly Universe.” How could he NOT be interested?!

Brains are habitual – they want to shuffle off the “work” of thinking to the automated control of a faster habitual response area as a complete package. A trigger of recognition is attached for when the habit should fire off. But it’s a nuisance to have to update a habit; (many don’t know how either.) Questioning the needs for creating so many habitual routines in the first place pays off. This happens from paying attention, which is how learning continues indefinitely.

Perhaps while we study brain science, music, creative thought in action (and maybe learn to speak Hopi?) we can resurrect and “sell” some respect for the generalists…

I’d like to hear what you have to say about one of the very real changes that has just occurred through technology. Now, any of us can be an author to get what we have to say out into the world. It’s a revolution similar to the printing press revolutionizing the written word.

I really enjoyed reading this after the earlier post on An Idea Worth Spreading.
High point for me: moving beyond collaboration and connection as a gimmick for business. The more real, giving people I connect with through the online space, the more I see how companies and institutions are getting it wrong. A company can’t experience intrinsic joy or reward through gifting and sharing. Profits and revenue and incentives are really just carrots and sticks, and a cornerstone of the taking economy. It’s the people stepping away from the companies and institutions – building communities instead – who offer sustainable value to the economy, learning opportunities, personal growth, and a way forward.

I think that once that viewpoint exists, THEN you can really transform the organization. We’re still going to work, we’re still going to be providing customers with products and services they need to make their life easier, that’s what we’ve always done – it’s not like we’re all going to just stop working and just sit around a fire and share.

This is a really practical way to look at it, to me. (And this is just MY mental model! I think everyone will make their own.)

To me, the point of building these networks in an online space are twofold: one, they connect you with real people around the world who can potentially help you become more successful in business. and two, you can use that “idea” of how a complex network works and bring it back into your real life physical organization.

I still think people are getting hung up on the online thing, the technological aspect. If you could pretend the computers disappeared, what you’d still have is a human network of connections. That’s the big picture, is that these lean, agile organizations we keep talking about wanting to construct as if they’re “out there” are actually “right here.” they’re us. they’re people. each of the people in the organization has to learn how to operate from this “systems thinking” perspective. (ok, maybe they don’t ‘have’ to, maybe not everyone is cut out for that, or their job doesn’t require it, but i think that the more people who can operate within this big picture framework, the better)

You’re completely right that we have taught our brains to become machines and lost a whole lot of the potential we once had. How we relearn is the interesting piece and connected data, networks and semantics (semantics are extremely powerful) are a good starting point.

The communal learning aspect has been happening since the webs inception often without being noticed. One of the beautiful things about the web is the way communities and groups form organically around a topic and harness the technology available to share and learn. Usenet was a great example back in the day!

thanks steve. and i guess really what i’m explaining is MY mental model. it’s not fair for me to say “just think about everything like a network” and POOF, everything changes. another perspective on this is called “systems thinking,” and that is a model that feels to me precisely the same, it’s just different ways of packaging it.

so ultimately, i can’t explain the mental model itself, because it’s in my head and totally individual. but i do think that all of us can get smarter by sharing more information with each other and reflecting on what we know and what we think we know.

I suggested that text-based communication may be an evolution in human communication, because it requires fewer attention resources, freeing people to think more. I hesitate on the verbal component because:

1. I appreciate the asynchrony of text-based communication. I present my ideas best when I’m at my best, which may not be when you are at your best (leading to a lop-sided conversation).

2. Intelligence doesn’t always correlate with verbal skills (a great mind might be too shy, too awkward, too slow or unusual in delivery to contribute well in a live conversation situation).

3. Text-based communication largely does away with visual and audio-based hierarchies (the loudest talker, the fastest talker, the most authoritative presence, the best looking person leading or being deferred to in conversation).

I really appreciate the level playing field text-based communication offers.

good points. what i’m thinking doesn’t require everyone to engage in the dialogue, they could just be watching. what i’m imagining is almost like a TED presentation, but instead of lecture format, what if there were 2 people talking about the idea, explaining WHY the idea is a good idea, HOW it could work, really unpacking it.

then it would be livestreamed, and other people could just watch and listen and maybe enter in some comments in the twitter backchannel.

i think just by watching and listening to other people explain their thinking process, helps us to learn.

My brain actually did learn — a fantastic insight — ‘where is the box that we must think outside of to solve a problem?’ — (roles and responsibilities and job descriptions).

However, I think that the basic requirement for the brain to learn and behave like a constant learning machine is to make and keep it empty for most of the time other than containing timeless truths — otherwise it has a tendency to get biased. But how to do that (the MISS/KISS principle) is a big question.

I term this as ‘centering’ — open and ready to ‘recognize’ a new information and change your experience and response through intelligent networking of the brain.

You have rightly pointed out that ‘dialogue’ is the next important part.

I eagerly await your discussion on this extremely important concept of ‘junta’.

that’s good advice. i think you’re right about ‘keeping it empty.’ the brain will do what the brain will do, and often comes up with those good ideas when we’re not thinking about it. of course, everything we learn and do informs it, but the brain kind of makes those connections without you having to get involved, it seems.

and yes, the other points you make, about remaining open to information, that is part of the idea of Junto – that we could engage in these dialogues, and practice understanding other viewpoints, even if we reject them, but just practicing staying open.

I think we’re thinking the same way with regard to innovation Venessa. The idea that I’ve been hammering on a bit recently is that innovations are always related to the economic networks within which they arise, that creativity is based on making novel connections between ideas, and that we get our innovative ideas to spread through network ties. All of these themes are pretty consistent with what you’re talking about here.

I do share Ike’s concern about the intentionality part of the post, but aside from that, this is more cogent, useful thinking. Thanks for another excellent post!

“But the brain doesn’t want to work like that. It wants to work like a network. It wants to send ideas and information all over the place, jumping from synapse to synapse on multiple pathways. It wants to be contextual, relational, adaptive, and non-linear. It wants to imagine things, map new models, and revise itself constantly. I think it WANTS to be a learning machine. ”

I don’t think that brains want anything. They just are. I think that they actually operate inpretty much the way that you describe – they are learning machines. We’ve been taught to ignore that, but they always have been networks, and learning machines and all the rest of it.

Both brains and social nets have emergent properties, and it sounds a bit like you’re talking about something like ‘guided emergence’ in both. I’m not sure that’s possible. I haven’t done it, but it would be interesting to compare what you’re saying here to what was in the ‘Twitter is a Complex Adaptive System’ post…

ok, i can agree with that. it doesn’t WANT to work in any particular way, but it is optimized when it is allowed to work in the way that is optimal.

lol, if that makes sense.

and i think that way is through pattern recognition, which happens kind of “on it’s own” “naturally”, without our direct intervention. all of the things we do with our bodies, all the movement, we’re not consciously thinking about how we move, it just moves. when i’m typing right now, i’m not thinking about where’s the “r” key, i just know where it is.

i think it will be bizarre to allow ourselves to just think in this way, because we feel like we don’t have “control”, but we do. it’s still our brain. i think all the interesting lateral thinking, ideation, creativity happens in this pattern recognition area. then once the idea has been generated, the rational brain steps in and says, “ok, can this be integrated into our business plan in a way that will be beneficial?” maybe the current situation is not optimal for this idea to be implemented, or there are some other steps that need to be completed before the time is right for implemention. so then you create a strategy that will create the path so that that idea can have the optimal conditions in order to thrive.

But, the metaphor of a system “wants” to x,y, z can be very useful. Back in the day when I did project management as the day job, I always found it useful to say ” What does X want to look like?” In working with graphic design, it was also useful to say “What does that cover want to be.”

The nice thing is that it’s a pretty effective way to adopt a systems POV instead of a personal POV. In the case of graphic design it puts the focus where it belongs – on the interaction of the visual elements.

I very much agree with this Michael. I may enter a recursive loop here, but social pressures have optimized many human brains to perceive complex phenomena as having a personality. Like all models, it will have gaps, and not all people have this bias, but for many of us asking “What would this like” or “How can we work together” works surprisingly well.

Phil Farber has put a lot of thought into how we can leverage personalization strategies and the neurological basis for why they work.

When you say “want” or “intent,” I hear it as evolution happening. It’s “what’s wanting to happen” via evolutionary movement. Just that “pull.” And when you are INTUITIVE, you sense the pull and can even have intentions around that pull, which is more the conscious minds answer to intuition (if you’re lucky).

Like, my daughter doesn’t WANT or intend to grow taller each year, necessarily, she just does. She’s not WANTING to learn simple math, necessarily, she just does. That’s what’s wanting to happen through her. I think when some people hear “want” or “intent” they think personification, man in the machine.

This gets into the techno-buddhist angle — it’s the “tao”.. the way.. the mystery. I think “evolutionary movement” is more palatable to the less metaphysically inclined among us ? But I do believe we’re all talking about/around the same thing.

Actually, Venessa, I thought you were on better ground saying that the brain wants this or that. I disagree with Tim when he says “I don’t think that brains want anything. They just are.”

Brains do, in fact, want. They are the primary organ of want, and as modern neuro-plasticity is teaching us, the brain can want to change the way it thinks or the way it perceives, and it can then do so. Such changes usually require some trauma or extensive labor (a Road to Damascus experience or years of practice), but they are common enough that we are all familiar with them. The brain is incredibly malleable and plastic, and what changes the brain is often the brain itself. When it wants to.

What can I say – as always,an unique and interesting post. Interestingly, the fundamental concepts you mention do resonate with the thoughts from(East)Indian philosophy.

You are right about the necessity to develop a ‘trust network’ to really succeed in the new social ecosystem. In addition to the things you said, one thing to keep in mind is also the fact that Trust is brittle and Social Networks are transparent. What I mean is that one has to earn trust as you said but over and above that, one has to keep working at maintaining that trust. In other words, faking actions to gain trust will not be sustainable in the new networked system.

I also agree with your ‘Rewire your brain’ concept for more than one reason. It used to be that people went to school, majored in a subject, took up a job, and/or became a specialist in that area. While all this is well and good, I feel that this path inhibited the person from using the “brain-power” to its full capacity. Even if you were innovative and opened a lot of doors, it was still all limited to that one area. While there is nothing wrong with this, like you I am of the opinion that the brain is an amazing piece of miracle (for lack of a better word). In fact, to me it is the most fascinating paradox – the more you use it and diversify its usage, the more powerful and stronger it becomes. The reason I am bringing this up here is that I feel the new networked world allows us to really push the capabilites of what we can do with the grey matter betwen our ears.

And lastly, if there is one group that will oppose the new way of thinking, it will be the power-brokers, politicians, and the like. While on paper we always talk about democracy, parity, etc., the world was still run by the rich and famous or those access to them. Now for the first time, there is a real possibility that the masses can really influence the shape and direction of this world — and that can be scary for a lot of people.

good point about trust being brittle. i remember reading a comment left by spiro, that what he did on Twitter was follow many diverse people at first, then watch and “get to know” who was who, and who seemed to be really “sharp,” and then he focused in on those people with whom to build trust. i think he called them his “mastermind” group, and they now collaborate on ideas/projects exclusively as a group.

this makes sense to me. you can’t build trust with 1,000 people, and maybe not even 100 people. (well, all at varying degrees). but there is only so much of yourself that there is time to invest online, so i think it’s probably up to each individual to find their “sweet spot” of what works for them.

My guess is that for many, the struggle is going to be on applying their view (or ideal criteria) of the “sweet spot” on their networks and finding that core-team(s) who they can relate and work with. This will take time and one has to go through some prototyping process. Part of the difficulty is that in the new ecosystem everthing is based on “mutuality” – meaning, it is not just enough for you to trust the other person, but the other person has to trust you too; similarly, it is not enough for you to like someone, they have to like you too at the same level to cement the relationship. Also, one has to do an introspection of their strengths and weaknesses on the various domains they interact with and depending on that decide what role they will play in that particular sub-system.

At the end of the day I agree with you that we are defined by finites – constraints on cognitive ability, constraints on time, constraints on relationships etc. and so have to prioritize out what is optimal for us at an individual level.

we know that complex systems operate within constraints, and this has been a huge part of the conversation of the “gift economy”, that you can’t just all be sharing and giving and relational all the time without constraint!

and i’ve been thinking, “OK, so what constraints should we impose for a gift economy to work?”

you just nailed it. we don’t have to define the constraints. the constraints have already been defined: cognitive capacity, time, relationships.

there may be others, but i think that THIS is the way constraints need to be viewed.

After your last post being so good, I find this one disturbingly conflicted and devoid of much value. You mention that it was supposed to be short and I think you’ve filled up a lot of space with filler words and pointless comparisions.

“It’s terrifying and magical, because it means that there is hope.
It means that we don’t have to stand by and let the economy and education
and government all erode and crumble around us as we watch from the sidelines.
There’s the opportunity to actually get involved, take charge of our own lives,
and join in the experiment and see how to make it a reality. How to make it THE reality.”

If you read this would you assume that the “It’s” you refer to is that thing you think of before bed about how the world could be better? Seriously, I think you need some sleep. Your “learning community” is energizing you, but not focusing you.

Reality is an experiment? Dreaming is the experiment. Reality is the result of how you act out your dreams. Reality is undivisible and cannot be joined or abandoned. An experiment implies a closed system and some way of measuring via controls. Reality has no controls or boundaries, except the fundamental forces of nature and even those will stretch and change though we’ll probably never notice.

Watch using the brain and the mind near each other they don’t mix easily. Also there is an emotional element to this post that is not written about or explained, that I can’t put my finger on. Maybe you’ll know what it is.

You mentioned we were taught to share as kids, but it was only with other kids and we were taught to be afraid of adults. Sharing in general is still considered dangerous or risky behaviour, and they never unteach the “don’t talk to strangers”, so it’s no wonder we have to unlearn it on our own.

The internet is not an experiment in community, it’s a backlash creation from an overtly individual society that fears community and/or communism. The scientific community created a way to share because it was desperate to conserve computing power and now it’s been extended to us as computing power has exploded. We’ve created a place where community is unstoppable because we wanted to make sure communism was stopped. What needs to happen is a balance between profit and gift economy, value creation and value consumption, community development and individual development. You’ve fallen for the newness of what is occuring and, in my opinion, are rehashing a false impression that what is new will wipe out what is old and nothing will be the same. You probably aren’t really meaning to say that, but I sense a distinct lack of balance in your excitement.

I get that people want to read and talk about what’s new, but really, being able to connect through twitter is no greater an advancement than the telephone and the telephone book. The network is not new, even before the telephone people were communicating and connecting on a global scale through the snail mail system. The power you have in the “new” network is not greater or easier, the infrastructure it runs on is switches and wires, it is faster and cheaper and follows different formats and rules, but there really isn’t that much newness in it. You still have to get people’s attention by saying something they agree or disagree with and care about. The difference is how many people are connecting, but this brings new issues not new thinking. Really, what new way of thinking has come about in the past 1000 years? People think a certain way based on what they know and what they desire. Maybe they know something new (or think they do), but they think the same way as ever and most peoples desires are to avoid fear and gain comfort. I agree the future of thinking is about rewiring our brains, but it’s mostly about exercising them, not thinking we’ve found the “new way”.

To finish, I couldn’t resist quoting this paragraph opener: “The beauty of the complexity of it is that in order to really reap the benefits of it…” My unasked for advice, is to clear your mind of the last lightning success, and all the commenting that went with it, before getting behind the keyboard again.

I’m being overly harsh, but I really, really, really liked your last post (even if it was a bit too long) and this one has the feel of an aftershock with nothing added.

But don’t worry you’ll strike lightning again soon. I knew the moment I started reading this blog back in November that you were onto something!

Thanks for writing and don’t take my critisim to heart, it’s only meant to help transcend the ego in your brain, or wherever you keep it. 😉

Thoughtful and provocative. But why do you think that community development via the web is to contain communism? I felt just the opposite is happening. It is generating the collective value without individual or mass exploitation — the essence of communism. And I also think that all progress in our human society depends on the ‘unreasonable man’. And the ‘unreasonable man’ would have an ‘ego’. Having this form of higher ego actually does a lot of good than any harm. It is true that the way of communicating has not changed in the last 1000 years but states of ‘becoming’ do. It is ever the same though it apparently seems to be recursive.

i’d be lying if i said your comment wasn’t difficult to read, but there’s no point having hurt feelings. i’m actually really surprised that this post resonated so differently with you. i’d love to talk to you about it if you’re on skype (me: venessamiemis). but let me try to address your points as best i can:

1. terrifying & magical – yeah, i can see how that could get misinterpreted, lol. let me set the record as straight as i can about my take on community:

again, this is actually coming from a personal place, so that may explain the “distinct lack of balance” that you sensed and the “an emotional element I can’t put my finger on.”

and thanks for pointing it out, because that’s pretty frustrating to me. i’m only human, i do have emotions, but i do put tremendous effort in attempting to present information in a critical way, open for interpretation and perspectives, and NEVER saying “this is what is.”

if it trailed off into emotionland, i apologize, and i certainly do take your criticism to heart, because i want to be taken seriously. i am trying to understand this stuff from an emotional perspective, because come on, we are all people, but also grounded in logical thought and rationality, because it’s necessary.

so about community:

the main thing that it boils down to for me is that what we’re actually dealing with here on the “social web” is just people. and you establish a little community of people that can benefit you in some way (challenge your thinking, provide you with resources, etc), and build a sense of trust with them and then they may help you out when asked.

this is not really mind-blowing stuff, but it was mind-blowing for me, because i don’t actually trust people. (well, now i kind of do, i see HOW you can build trust, i see how this thing could work).

I’m a loner. I don’t have a big social network in real life. I’m pretty painfully shy and socially awkward, and I often feel like I have a really hard time relating to people. I’ve lived in the city where I live for 3 years now – it’s a pretty small town, so I’m recognized at the bagel shop or coffee shop or grocery store, the cashier or owner knows my name, but we’re not friends. I don’t “trust” them.

When I say I don’t trust them, it doesn’t mean I’m afraid of them or think they’re evil, I just don’t really know them well enough to know anything more about them than they happen to work at that store. If I needed help with something, it wouldn’t cross my mind to ask any of them, because we don’t have any established trust. It’s just casual acquaintance. (kind of like most twitter connections)

I have 2 “friends” in town, and I wouldn’t even really classify them as friends, they’re more like business acquaintances, but I have built enough trust with them that if I needed help, I would feel comfortable giving them a call and asking them for a recommendation for what I need.

I have been wanting to build a social circle for a long time. I joined our Sloop Club, and attended their potlucks a few times and tried to “get involved” with neighborhood cleanups and volunteering at the riverfront for different events in our community. I joined several different organizations, trying to meet people and make friends and a trust network.

Honestly, nothing really stuck for me. I had a really hard time, and it kind of fizzled out.

Then I started this online exploration thing. I’ve been doing this blog and Twitter, exploring THIS community. (And I understand the web isn’t really a community, it’s a huge overlapping chaotic soup of different people with different interests and motives and reasons for being online.)

As the months have gone by, I started noticing people. Noticing people’s interests. Noticing what people do for a living, the art they create, the people they interact with. I started noticing how groups of people interact, how they share information or advice or tips or quotes, in this very casual, non-threatening, non-risky format.

Because of the transparency of people’s personal information on the web, you have the ability to explore each other, without making a commitment to be their friend. (Friendship takes effort, and is probably why I DON’T have many friends…. I don’t have time to really dig into people deep enough to find out if this person is really worth my time. That’s not to sound mean, but it’s just reality. We’re all busy.)

This was something I hadn’t really considered before. And because so many people have blogs now, what I thought was REALLY interesting is you can discover someone via Twitter or however, and if you stumble upon their blog, and read some of their posts – if you read a little deeper and get past the CONTENT of the post, you are actually exploring the WAY they think.

Part of my ‘method’ of following new people is to read a few of their blog posts and see how they think. If a person seem to have an interesting way of putting ideas together and stimulates my curiosity, I usually follow. If they follow me back, I send them a DM saying something about how I like the way they think, and will reference something I read in one of their posts. I do this so they know I actually am listening to them, and am actually interested in THEM, not their profile or how many followers they have or anything like that. Truly interested in them as a person, for whatever reason.

Usually this results in a DM back with something like “Wow! Thanks for the personalized response! Looking forward to your tweets!” It’s a simple exchange where I’ve shown some appreciation for who they are, right up front.

As I’ve been doing this over the months, and then because I read their blog and have some understanding of how they think, I’m getting better at sending them information I think might be useful to them when I come across it. Or if I see something an entire group might enjoy, I tag a tweet accordingly. (i.e. #educhat, #innochat, #SCRM, #socent, etc).

Eventually, this “targeted sharing”, along with other casual exchanges, and conversations that happen here on the blog, or via email, or via skype, all add up to develop some level of trust.

Now I have formed a pretty nice little group of people that I trust.

And when that REALIZATION came, that I actually HAVE a trust network, it blew my mind.

What struck me is that this is just people being nice to each other. It’s the way people behave in the Sloop Club, and the other random organizations I tried joining.

The REASON joining those groups didn’t “work” for me, is because I wasn’t giving anything.

I thought that just by joining and showing up to a potluck, that made me a member.

Maybe on paper I was a member, but I didn’t belong.

I have been kind of terrified of people my whole life. Not knowing how to “be natural” around strangers, and people pick up on that. They see if you look awkward or uptight. And then if someone would try to talk to me, I would be flummoxed and not even know how to carry on a conversation.

The point is, I was socially retarded.

So I’ve been playing around online, and essentially have learned how to be nice, how to be myself without being afraid someone is going to judge me, and even when they DO judge me (like your comment here), it’s not really a judgement, it’s just another person with another perspective. No one is out to get me and intentionally trying to hurt me. (or maybe sometimes they are, i don’t know).

And you know what happened?

I become a nice person in real life. Through an online simulated community that I more or less built on my own, I learned what community means. I learned how to just share information and pieces of myself without being afraid of what will happen.

Do you have any idea how hard it is for me to write this blog? I am really exposing my deepest thoughts about everything here, in public. OK, I don’t share what I do behind closed doors in my bedroom, but THAT, my friend, is none of your business. 😉

But this is actually a lot harder and more personal than that anyway.

And you know what, not everyone is shy or socially awkward. There are many many people who already “get” what I discovered, because they live that way already. They are generally good people, not heavily guarded, nice to strangers for no reason than because it’s nice, and they have a smaller trust network as well.

So maybe that’s why the last post resonated with so many people, because they already know that being a nice person is a good way to live. That believing that you can form a personal group of “friends” or “alliances” or “trustworthy” people that you can rely on for some type of support is healthy and intelligent.

The strange thing for me was that it happened online, and not in real life. But it has TRANSFERRED to real life.

And I guess what excited me was… what if more people who are like me, who are nice people on the inside, but socially awkward, who don’t really know what it means to give and belong to a community, to have this online playground to “experiment” and learn how to share. What if by doing that they woke up and looked around their real life and realized, there are a lot of good people surrounding them all the time, who would be willing to be a part of their trust network.

But it starts with you. No one is going to build a community around you. You have to build a community around yourself. You have to learn how to do it on your own.

It seems really easy now, but I’ve been struggling with this my whole life. I see this as the “magic” of the web – that you can be in charge of your own reality, you can literally build it around you, by meeting people and making connections.

This has changed my approach to life. This past week I’ve been thinking about my city and these various groups. I’m seeing A LOT more opportunity now. I see a lot of places where I could contribute my skills (writing, helping businesses implement a “social media strategy”, etc), and actually “belonging” to a community. Maybe I’ll go rejoin the Sloop Club with my new eyes.

Oh, wow! I studied electrical engineering because I was shy and awkward with people. Near graduation I looked for what to learn next, found people skills important and went into sales, B2B, successful.

As a first impression, I saw you as an outgoing and open person. Sincere and consistent, easy to build trust with. Would not have guessed how recently the personable and beautiful butterfly emerged. Keep creating and take time off it all as well.

Thank you for the response. It is much clearer to me now, why you’ve shared this. You should include your personal awkwardness at the beginning and then the post would flow from your emotional base and be clear to even crazy people like me. 😉

Being socially awkward myself, I can tell you that I understand your position. Learning about trust is big and I’m glad you’ve had these eureka moments.

This reminds me of that dm you sent me asking me why I was being so nice to you. You had already earned my trust and goodwill. This is the “terrifying magic” that people are good naturally. I’m going to write a journal entry on my blog around my own experience. Thanks for the inspiration!

i love that we’re doing this publicly. this is exactly what i think the world needs more of. people explaining their views to each other to form a shared understanding.

i could have easily not responded to your comment, or gotten really ticked and lashed out (because honestly, it takes SOOOOOO much less effort to lash out and get angry than to TRY to help someone see your point of view), and we would have gotten nowhere, and i may have lost a friend. or alliance, or whatever it is that we are to each other!

instead i spent an hour explaining myself. not defending myself. just explaining how i see it and where i’m coming from.

and you really can’t argue with that. we waste too much time arguing, and if we look at it, arguing means at least one person is defending their viewpoint, instead of just explaining it.

this exchange actually just taught me an important lesson about trust and understanding and how to build it and how to preserve it.

It’s great to see tangible personal progress made through this forum / comment thread. I think the dialogue that’s emerged can inspire more disconnected people to get involved with social media. It makes for a convincing case study that people can relate to.

Scott, I’ve been troubled by your comments for several days now. The tone is dismissive, condescending, and jaded, making very little attempt to understand and every attempt to rain on the parade. I think you can write, so you should know better. Perhaps the original post was not clear to you. Then seek clarification.

Pontifications such as this require that the writer write from a position of authority: great wealth, great power, or great knowledge. Perhaps you have such authority, but in this forum and for me, it isn’t readily and intuitively apparent. For instance, I find it easy to challenge several of your pronouncements. First, you so readily dismiss Venessa’s vision of the world changing, and you willfully or just ineptly misinterpret her language.

She says: “What is actually happening on the web is an epic experiment in creating a new society. When you hear people talk about this online “gift economy,” and “building value and trust,” and “sharing” – this is WAY beyond a new gimmick for your business. Please don’t underestimate what’s going on. This is actually people laying down the foundation and infrastructure for a new global economy. There is a movement that is slowly gaining steam as people are “waking up,” and it has the potential to change the world. That thing you think about before you go to sleep at night, when you say “sigh, if only the world was a little more like ___” – that thing is actually going on right now. It’s terrifying and magical, because it means that there is hope.”

You reply: “If you read this would you assume that the “It’s” you refer to is that thing you think of before bed about how the world could be better? Seriously, I think you need some sleep.” No, it is the social and economic shift brought on by the emergence and continued development of a global communication infrastructure. Her antecedents are clearly there before she uses the indefinite pronoun. What made you want to misread the really rather clear statement and its intent so badly? Was it just the chance it afforded for you to dismiss her comments about the big shift with the snide “I think you need some sleep?” You can do better.

Then, you say: “Reality is an experiment? Dreaming is the experiment. Reality is the result of how you act out your dreams. Reality is undivisible and cannot be joined or abandoned. An experiment implies a closed system and some way of measuring via controls. Reality has no controls or boundaries, except the fundamental forces of nature and even those will stretch and change though we’ll probably never notice.”

Are you responding to the comment that “the web is an epic experiment in creating a new society?” If so, then you have again misread. I don’t see that the post ever says or implies that “reality is an experiment.” You’ve set up a straw-man, and then you fail to knock it over. Your definitions and metaphysics are suspect and vague. You seem to imply that experiments are not part of reality. Most of the experiments conducted at my university are all very real—just ask the students dissecting the frogs. Ask the frogs. To my mind, the emerging Web is an experiment as the post says, in the sense that Karl Popper speaks of constant tinkering with any system to improve it.

You say: “Watch using the brain and the mind near each other they don’t mix easily.” Actually, in the work of many scientific researchers mind is nothing more than the physical functioning of a brain. I don’t particularly agree with this position, but it is held by a great many serious researchers and strongly defended by them with solid research. You should be able to google it and find references.

Then you say, and I’ll end with this: “Also there is an emotional element to this post that is not written about or explained, that I can’t put my finger on.” This is a complaint? What is wrong with emotion or writing about it or with it? Perhaps you do not like the enthusiasm this post expresses about the emerging Web. Perhaps you are more experienced and knowledgeable and thus jaded and are bored with those who are still invigorated by this new Web. The Web isn’t new, you counter. Yes, it is. Your comment is like saying the human brain isn’t new. True, the basic technology, and similar technology, has been around for hundreds of millions of years, but sometime in the last hundred thousand years or so the human brain reached a critical mass and emerged as something new, something conscious, something self-reflective. This is something radically different from the brains of mice who share most of our basic neural technology, neurons and synapses.

Well, I really must get back to work, but I want to close by saying that this original post was all about building trust within a community, a trust that people would work with you to explore and create meaning. This does not mean that we all have to agree. Such easy agreement does nothing to push a discussion forward, but neither do dismissive remarks and pontifications move a discussion forward. You could have tackled all the issues that you mentioned in a more cooperative and less confrontational manner. And I wish you had.

I think it points to an interesting data point in regard to the creation of trust in the proximate physical world that is merely more transparent and unbounded in the Space/Time of the internet. There are two books that are on relevant. One is called On Bullshit by Prof Henry Frankfort. The other is the No Asshole Rule. I forget the author but it’s some business professor at Stanford. No need to summarize their arguments. The wikipedia entries tell the tale.

Hey Scott,
I bet that if we really figured it out, you and I would agree on a lot of stuff. I would say there are no New Ideas, just different implementations of the most fundamental ideas of humans. What we refer to as the classics. I probably share your snarky attitude. You should hear my tweets and rants about how new media is going to overtake old media. (I’m a print evangelist.) I’ve always believed the Print is Dead meme was bullshit when I first heard it. Given what the Stock Market has been doing lately, I’m right and they were wrong.

But, in this context, projecting that attitude is just not appropriate. Given that it’s the web, probably no one’s feelings get hurt. That’s the good news. The bad news is that by going over the top, you say things that I bet you don’t believe as written.

“An experiment implies a closed system and some way of measuring via controls.”
Yes, but any social science deals with this problem every day.

“Really, what new way of thinking has come about in the past 1000 years?”
Darwin, Marx, Relativity and Quantum Theory.

“Being able to connect through twitter is no greater an advancement than the telephone and the telephone book.”

From a meta level – 30,000 feet this could be true. But I bet you don’t really mean it as written. If you do, that’s just silly on the face of it.

“We’ve created a place where community is unstoppable because we wanted to make sure communism was stopped. ”

Interesting, but who precisely is “we”. Clearly the internet evolved. I assume, but don’t know that you don’t buy into creationism, but one never knows.

Of course, simple sentences and words without context don’t communicate the nuances and references implied by your thinking. But, there is the right time and the right place and the right words to communicate in different contexts.

Loved your thoughts on this
when 2 people havé a conversation to solve a problem , it gets solved faster and with a better solution, so the math of problem solving is 1 1 gets to 3. This increases in speed of solve and gain in the quality of solution such that 1 1 1 = 5. So sharing a problem with a network in the right way with feedback loops is like turning coal into a diamond in days rather than thousands of years. A great post well done.

Concerning your latest posts (this one and the Future is Networks): This video fits the big picture very good (on the biological level), it is an interview with an evolutionary biologist, and he explains how there is one singular humanity. Beautiful, the ‘everything is network’, in terms of our cells. Can I say that on the individual level, it would mean, that we as individuals have to first realize this (awareness) and then connect with others?

thanks for this gift! the video confirms my idea about setting up a Junto – because the power of dialogue, even when only watching others engage in it, helps to create an understand more than a lecture.

2 perspectives on an idea are always more powerful than just one.

very cool.

i wish i would have known you when we came to visit your little island, i have a feeling that we’re like Sisters!

Thank you for those beautiful words. the feeling is mutual, it does feel like we are sisters.You are always welcome to visit this part of the world.

And your blog has become a learning space/platform, where dialogue is taking place, collective intelligence emerging (the membrane expanding). Those cells are here connecting. Great meeting you, and all these folks here, we are learning so much from each other! A living dialogue!

It is a amazing video. Went on to see all the available videos of Dr. Bruce Lipton on Youtube and made a personal paradigm shift. Thanks for sharing this. This is for the first time i found a proper scientific answer as to why meditation in any form works. Thanks again!

Linear thinking emerged from the Renaissance, our greatest period of human advance in the Arts, Science, Mathematics, etc. Newton and Descartes raced forward, teaching us that “The whole visible world is as if it were a machine in which there was nothing at all to consider except the figures and motions of its parts.” We emerged from the Renaissance believing that the the Universe was governed by a small set of mathematical laws.

So, in truth, you’re describing more than 100 years of “thinking”. It’s the worldview “box” (ideology) we were taught to believe in . . . so questioning it means questioning everything we know about how the world really works. That’s why it’s resisted.

It worked during the Industrialization Era – the boom of the middle class in more industrialized societies . . . yet had its costs as well. We’re squeezing through the other end of the funnel here in the U.S. (and Western Society today, to include Japan).

You could say it worked particularly well here in the U.S. after we reduced Germany and Japan to rubble after WWII. Our competition evaporated. It was great to be an American during “the Old Days” that are so often idealized (well, unless you were black or a woman, of course, but the beautiful depictions of “family life” in the U.S. the 1950s’ don’t show the ugly side of things . . . )

As I’ve mentioned before, this worldview came crashing down on 9/11. The importance of Human Networks came into view . . . in fact, Alan Greenspan comments here on being distressed upon finding a flaw within his “worldview” after our recent Financial Services collapse (which, in actuality, was purposefully engineered).

Greenspan: “I found a flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works, so to speak . . . ”

Think about the significance of Greenspan’s admittance that his way of viewing how the world works may have been flawed all along. I’m 34 years old, and can remember during the 90s’ when Greenspan was considered the most powerful man alive . . . .

If we can just learn that human existence itself is one huge network (which is a smaller subset of Nature itself), we’ll be in position to make progress. The mass movement and awareness toward “green” and sustainability is an example of humanity coming together . . .

I found my way here via a pointer on Twitter. I’ve been building and working with online communities since the late 1980s, and your response to Scott above (which is where I landed from the link I followed) revived memories of my own awkward first steps into virtual worlds of connection and trust. I live in Austin, Texas, which was far more provincial in the late 80s and 90s, and few in this city were interested in the things I was thinking about, so my local relationships were limited, though I had some experience with local physical community-building. Through the web I found affinities and connections I never would have found otherwise.

I know this all seems new to you, but what you’re talking about has been going on for at least a couple of decades. In the 90s we had more communities of sustained conversation and saw a potential for collaboration. More recently, with activity streaming or life streaming, conversations have been more “drive by” and random, it seems to me – a different sense of social – but I sense we’re started to look for more coherent and sustained conversational spaces, and better practices for real collaboration.

I don’t quite understand your use of the term “snowcrash.” That term’s normally associated with a breakdown or failure mode; you seem to be using it as something like “insight.”

Awesome again, Venessa, and also the comments, contributors!
I would like to comment on the intentionality issue. There is a whole long philosophical tradition to this term, also some psychology and action/agency theory that define intentionality to be essential for the human mind. Mind, not brain. This distinction may be useful here. As social beings humans search for meaning. I may be repeating myself here compared to a former post, but that is my understanding of dialog and communication, participating in creating and sharing social meaning. It is great to participate here. Looking forward to more.

Have also been playing with these ideas and created this test system called Respkt http://respkt.com which allows anyone to acknowledge anyone else and establish that trust connection. Currently it leverages Twitter so that you just tweet something like

@respkt to @tshelton for creating Respkt

and the Respkt site tracks your ID and the association you have created to the person you have given Respkt to… A lot to do in this area!

As i just finished reading this blog post, i noticed on my tweet stream in tweetdeck that because of a recommended blog post i made to one of the people i am following would of been of great interest to them,

thus i sent them a tweet to have a look and in that tweet i mentioned the person it came from.

then what followed was those two people connecting and sayng, “i look forward to connecting and exchanging views” now perhaps those two would have never crossed paths,

it feels good to be part of something that in the end truly reveals our happiness.

I started off using facebook as a way to find people with interesting ideas for the purpose of expanding my own mind. I began to notice that most groups had very few people in common. Since then I have intentionally been trying to move ideas across boundaries.

First, good call to go back to school. I find too many bloggers provide nothing more than conjecture in their online efforts and that is a very dangerous place to take the internet. I hope in the future you will provide additional support to your statements and link outward (another value of the internet, its altruistic nature) to other documents the reader might find beneficial.

I have lots of thoughts on all your themes above (you have many) but want to comment on one which I consider to be the greatest values of the internet – building knowledge.

It is only by reaching outside our community, engaging others (individually or by reading, listening, watching their information) with opposing views, etc. that we can build knowledge – heavy emphasis on opposing views. Standing inside our own echo chamber/community provides no growth whatsoever. This isn’t to say we shouldn’t surround ourselves with a community for safety (perceived or otherwise) sake but if you are looking to build knowledge I assure you it won’t likely be found there. Obviously you touch on this but I hope you will dig deeper into cognitive, media, education and philosophy theories and studies which support and negate some of your key themes. As an aside, creating knowledge isn’t an easy process or organized in any fashion and it never has been, even before the internet.

One final thought, don’t inflate the value of these tools in and of themselves. Don’t mistake twitter/tweets for information – it is only data. For that matter don’t mistake information for knowledge or knowledge for wisdom. Each is very unique in its own right.

please check out the Idea Worth Spreading – it’s what inspired this post. (warning: a long read!) – if you read the post and the following comments, i think you will walk away with many new insights.

thanks for encouragement with school – although to be honest, my learning happens here. the school is a formality because “the real world” still values the piece of paper, but many insights happen here in “the commons.” i see myself as a thinker who blogs, not a blogger who thinks.

re: building knowledge. as the title of the blog suggests, that is why we’re here. there aren’t enough public learning spaces online like this one, where many of us can share our perspectives and learn and grow together, so i’m glad you found us. welcome!

re: supporting arguments – if you go back through the posts, i do reference where i got things from, but everything recently congealed, and this post and the last were written from intuition. of course it was all built upon previous work, and much of the work it’s built on is actually found within the comments section of this blog.

i know referencing a comments section is “unconventional”, but quite frankly, it is happening that way! we are forging a new way of learning, a new way of building knowledge, and i think that means we have to also create new frameworks for what “knowledge” means. there is a place for experts, but if we are to be tapping into knowledge and wisdom, there are many more experts in those “fields” than we give credit for.

what’s happening here is a generative learning process.

we are learning/building/growing daily.

i have so many things that i would like to write as academic papers, but by the time i would do so and get it published (a year from now?), the information would already by dated.

i feel i’m able to have more impact in the real world by doing it this way. if there are academics out there who want to collaborate with me and these ideas, and they want to do the tedious MLA format, i would be happy to collaborate.

but i don’t have time for that. i am committed to what we are doing here.

re: your final thought; i think this has very little to do with the tools. it has everything to do with the people. i am finding that no matter how clearly i try to state that, people are telling me not to emphasize the tools.

if the entire internet disappeared, i would still be talking about the networks.

it’s not online. it’s just VISUALIZED online. it’s the real relationships that exist between two human beings that i am suggesting we should build. we are just using the web as an interface.

and thank you for advice regarding the difference between data/info/knowledge/wisdom – i agree they are very distinct, and often confused. i’m pushing for the expansion of the upper end, let the lower end be the details.

Venessa, I like and I do appreciate your emphasis on human relationships rather than on the tools. There is value to that emphasis. However, do not be tempted by your critics to de-emphasize the tools. They are also important and carry much value.

I truly believe that the networks you are describing are not possible on such a large scale without the electronic tools that we have developed, and those tools are not value neutral. It makes a fundamental difference that I interact with you via a blog, via email, via television, telephone, typed letters, telegraph, handwritten letters, face-to-face speech, marks in the sand, or grunts and gestures. We can, quite literally, think and say different things in different media, or tools. I believe this was one of the core points of McLuhan. We connect through media from spoken language to computer screens, and each medium carries a slightly different message, makes a slightly different connection. At least, I think so.

McLuhan’s point, or one of them, was that media are extensions of human senses… and of the human mind and body. McLuhan’s media matrix is similar to Vladimir Vernadsky’s and Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere: the “sphere” or network of human thought. Media are connective contexts.

Well, I have enjoyed reading your posting Vanessa, and all the comments too.

I’m reminded almost every day that many people criticise the social web without having bothered to experience much of it first-hand. That’s why sharing your experience and the rewards that have come your way from being in networked conversation with so many is so important. Thank you for doing that.

For myself, I suppose I’m one of the “power users” of social media. As a strategic thinker I often fell more at home on the social web than in the fragmented and strategically stifling experience of authoritarian hierachies offline. Just as old media is feeding off social media, so should organisations – whether business, non-governmental or government – seek to learn and add value from the social web.

Another intriguing post Venessa. I can’t find it at the moment in my thoughts on mind, but last year I came across a great work by Alan G. Carter (I think) on juxtapositional thinking versus stress based procedural thinking. It could very well be related to the “intuition” based brain you describe.

The post and comments have spurred a lot of ideas but I’ll try to be succinct and only hit the important ones!

Although I don’t agree with Scott’s tone, I agree with most of what he says.

Really this is not that new. After all, the Internet itself was built on selfless cooperation. And it’s certainly not an experiment. This is life, a progression. No going back.

Based on research, there is no such thing as re-wiring your brain (except in the case of trauma like a war). Your basic neural framework — how you approach the world — is more or less established by the time you’re 15. You can try to condition it, trick it, cajole it, but basically you think within your box.

However, this is where the beauty of the social web really lies! True innovation, collaboration and inspiration come from COMBINING our boxes, just as we have done in the comment stream of this post, just as we do on Twitter and every other mechanism that mashes, builds, twists and turns ideas. Combining our boxes, our mental frameworks… now there is the potential for real breakthroughs!

Thanks for sharing and having the guts to put yourself out there my friend. Well done.

Agreed that this has transitioned beyond an experiment, though I feel less sure about no going back.

Very much disagree with your characterization of neurological research. Numerousstudiesshow that the brain constantly reorganizes itself throughout adulthood. Perhaps most to the point, the brain integrates new appendages into its model of self, even in adulthood and constantly adjusts our body map when utilizing tools. The Extended Mind and Becoming Beside Ourselves both make very strong, research based arguments that these neurological changes occur with every technology, including the alphabet and computer networks.

Mark, as Michael and Cole both point out, you may have too rigid a view of the brain and its inability to rewire. Doidge’s The Brain that Changes Itself is an easy read that covers much of the most recent research into neuro-plasticity. I think you are correct about trauma as a way of rewiring the brain, but you omit hard practice, such as meditation. Those who practice know that they can rewire their brains, even in old age. Is it more difficult? Yes, but still doable.

Hey my favorite sister-in-law. I’m so happy for you that you’ve had this “aha” moment. That’s wonderful. I found your blog post very interesting. I had a hard time making the connection to the brain and Twitter b/c I’ve never been on the site so I have no experience with it. It’s funny….Kris has said to me “Why do you go on the Postpartum site? Do you really make a connection with people that you are typing to? What about face to face connections? Aren’t they so much more important?” I replied by saying the following observations I’ve had with my postpartum depression online community:

-You can connect with MANY women who share your experiences, feelings, and thoughts whereas in my small community, it would be difficult to connect to someone face to face. In some communities, women can’t find any support and then they really feel alone.
-You are almost more willing to put your stuff out there b/c you aren’t face to face with a person and they don’t know EXACTLY who you are…I’ve shared very personal things with women who understand where I’m coming from and I don’t know them personally. I’m okay with that.
-You can connect with women from different parts of the world with different backgrounds, ethnicities, and belief systems. For example, women with different cultural backgrounds provide unique advice and support.
-The sharing of knowlege, experience, and resources is so plentiful online.

However, I get what Kris is saying. Face to face interaction is so valuable too. My path right now is similar to yours in many ways. You mentioned how our brains are made to create and constantly learn new information. I agree. I also think the majority of people out there, especialy in our culture, spend most of their waking hours not using their brain effectively. Instead, their thoughts are consumed by “things”, worries, sex, food, alcohol, and the need for more pleasures to dull any uncomfortable feelings or pain. We get consumed by these thoughts, which unfortunately take us away from LIFE. Life meaning our experiences, our connections with the Earth, with God, with people in our lifes, with an online community, with nature. So for me, my path right now is to calm my brain and separate from my “common” thoughts and just be peaceful and present in my life. I also listen to my God thoughout the day and messages he sends me. This helps me keep my life going in the direction that my Higher Power believes is best for me.

I like what you mentioned about balance on the phone. I think that is key. Connecting with online communities….sharing ideas and learning as a community is wonderful. Hopefully, your shift in thinking will spark big ideas for solving big world problems we have right now. We have the gift of the Internet to connect people and knowledge…it’s just a matter of utilizing it correctly. And then there’s connecting face to face. Getting off your computer for awhile and getting into your life around you. Helping people in your community, enjoying nature, being still and content. Just being present and grateful. And accepting your thoughts and emotions for what they are….not getting sucked into them but surrending to them. We all have ups and downs, good days and bad days.

I made a connection to your idea of collaborative thinking to some recent meetings I’ve been going to with a friend whose battling a narcotic addiction. I don’t know if you know much about AA or NA but boy is it a powerful network of learning. The whole point is to surrender and admit that you can’t battle addiction alone, get into a program, work the 12 steps (which are amazing), have faith is someone or something bigger than your self, find a sponsor, and give and receive support and love from a group of people. It’s pretty powerful stuff. I’m following the 12 steps with my own issues…smoking…other compulsions and rituals. I’m feeling really good right now. I feel like I’m living in the “gray” zone….nothing to extreme, everything in moderation, day by day, gratitude, balance.

Anyway, those are some of my thoughts. I love you girl. You are so bright and by reading the comments, you’ve obviously inspired many of your followers.

My own experience agrees with yours very much. Communities of interest and the mediation of text expand the reach of our networks in space and time. I feel like sharing very personal moments comes much easier in these spaces, perhaps due to a lack of other relational baggage that come with more general relationships.

I love that you brought up AA and 12-Step programs. The same analogy comes to me often, that we’re all here together, helping bring out the best in each other and providing support for those times we feel weak.

Venessa, you wouldn’t know how I enjoy reading your blog which was recommended to me from a friend on twitter earlier today. I wonder how you learned to communicate circularity and complexity so beatifully?

When I read this post, the first thing that came to my mind was Gregory Batesons concept about Mind and his attempt to create a metatheory which sees all living systems as interwoven and connected – like a pattern and like a collective learning system. In his late years Bateson approached the sacred in the same way this post and the comments have discussed buddhism, mindfullness and compassion. Finally, the previous comment about AA’s idea about surrendering to something which is truly bigger than ourselves is also part of Batesons new metatheory/epistemology. I’m happy because of the beauty in co-creating and sharing meaning and learning.

Seems like we share the same mindset when it comes to systems thinking, complexity, social constructionism, internet, social media, relational being, social networks, doing good and learning how to trust people we don’t know. This is truly interesting – and the good thing is, that it inspires me to put my own thoughts, ideas and concepts *out there*! so watch out;-)

Trust can be the in the combination of person and situation. I am in a situation of trust with thousands of dance partners. If I screw up they could get hurt, and badly. They accept my invitation to dance, even though they have never seen be before, relying on the reputation of the dance and the organisation behind it.

Dancing & Discourse

The attendees can spectate or participate. They usually participate in pairs, but threesomes are seen most nights, one leader and two followers. The follower(s) may be “given space” to improvise, or more rarely “steal” the lead. It is usual to chat to partner. At the end of three minutes everybody changes partners, though partnerships can continue by mutual consent.

It strikes me that a similar formalised model could apply to a networked group, using dialogue. The salient points being recorded interaction between 2/3 people with a fixed limit, a period of reflection by those participants, then they can resume their discourse together or with different partners.

Dialogue in pairs, limited space on the “floor” forcing most to spectate, a brief pause whilst partners change, and a new set of “dancers” take the floor. I could obviously expand on this applying the rules of Modern Jive dance to the debating model.

As I mentioned on Twitter I really like your ideas and analysis on network culture and collective intelligence. Especially the brain part is extremely intriguing. Coming from the tradition of (critical) cultural studies & post-structural theory here are some thoughts that came to mind.

In the chapter 3. Rewire your brain you elaborate on the fact that we need to build a new brain in order to establish a new society that is a society of networks sharing and collaborating. You mention that for a century now, we have been forcing our brain to work like a machine but now due the virtual networks we are learning to use our brain in a new way. This actually is something that is parallel to the development Franco “Bifo” Berardi describes in his (amazing) book The Soul At Work: From Alienation to Autonomy (MIT Press 2009). Bifo actually shows how labour has transformed from machinic process to immaterial labour where mind, language and creativity are used as primary tools for production of value. Our physical bodies are lost behind the computer screens and our souls are put to work.

Now you have described the positive effects of becoming “a switch” that is being in medias res deciding which info is delivered where and what is to be filtered. It is a part of a learning process and emergence of a collective intelligence. What Bifo however asks is what the price for this development is? What happens when we become these neuro-workers receiving data and passing it on, what happens when communication becomes a means of producing value? What you call “sharing yourself” is for Bifo self-realization through work. The economic enterprise takes over your desires, language, creativity and makes you work for its own benfits. The division between work and freetime disappears. Moreover becoming a node and exposing oneself for the excess of information is something that is superior to human capacities of elaboration. This according to Bifo leads to panic and/or depression. To keep up with the information flow means accelerating vital activities towards a point where they collapse. Collapse may be defined as depression; the inability to be in on the flow of info. For Bifo the “Prozac-economy” of the 1990’s is an example of this development. Now this of course might be just a question of adaptation. When our brain gets used to functioning as a part of a network we might get over these psychopathological problems.

For me I think, the bigger ideological question around collective intelligence is how we are able to separate work and freetime. How we are able to disconnect ourselves from the rat race even temporarily. While this post may seem negative an overly critical towards collective intelligence it is not my intention. There are a lot of benefits on affirming collective intelligence and making it work (for it is the new form of society whether we want it or not). The question is how we can make it a good one; a society that instead of exploiting is one of positive utilization.

>>To keep up with the information flow means accelerating vital activities towards a point where they collapse

@hello_world made a similar observation in a recent post called “Slaves of the Feed: This is not the real time we’ve been waiting for” (http://j.mp/5c4lmO ).

Instead of searching for answers in automated or collaborative human filtering, he proposed a quite radical alternative.

As I understand his suggestion, we have another way to deal with the exaflood — by projecting outlines of our desired futures into the feed, and designing systems that help these projected idealities to attract in what they need to take practical form.

Such ideal-based system has a benefit beyond making our daily lives less enslaved to the torrent of information. It frees us to join in soul-nourishing journeys with others to co-create futures worth living in.

Thanks for the article, Vennessa. I’m glad you’re getting inspired around this important topic.

FWIW, Umair Haque just wrote an article that dissects some of the assumptions common in social media. I mention his article not as a criticism of your efforts but, rather, as a good framework for the problem space in digital networking. His points highlight some of the issues that need to be addressed in order to advance towards the goals you speak to, for example the actual value of dime-a-dozen social media relationships, the presence of hate & exclusion, and the “commodity of friendship”.

After a few discoveries and aha moments reading several documents, what i failed to understand was how fast we are actually moving.

There’s so much information “out there” floating around including human network which in itself is “information” of human kind and trying to figure it out, or gain insight of the highest type cannot and will not be conformed.

Great insights and new levels of added value information only come from present moment improvs of human networks meeting at point of contacts, in other words you find yourself in universal dimensions all the time and each prsent moment asks you to not think but bring yourself into that present moment and using intuitive knowing leave your “mark” and move on.

(I’m confused myself) but what i see “social media” twitter especially doing is creating universal present moments of organizing chaos without disrupting the flow of insight being gathered by human networks.

Waves to Jon Lebkowsky. 🙂 And a bit of a giggle about the Umair post that Chris mentions. Actually I was considering posting on Umair’s piece about your post here. I agree with Jon that this has been going on for some time. My breakthrough was in the Omidyar.net community where I bonded with about 100 social change folks. There is nothing so sublime (and yet disturbing) as meeting someone –someone you have grown to love online – f2f for the first time. I have done it hundreds of times and traveled far and wide to do it over and over again. Trust? Are you kidding? These connections have trained me, inspired me, consoled me, challenged me, funded me, collaborated with me, paid me, found me work, brought me relationships, and all that good stuff that comes from real life connections. As a hermit, I think this is a very good thing.

Is this how the brain works? Maybe. Making models is fun. 🙂

I have been loosely interested in collective intelligence for a few years. What comes up for me in reading this post is that the global brain isn’t just for sage wisdom–higher thoughts of the cerebral cortex–it might also have a pituitary gland. 😛

Riffing on that metaphor, I would love to know what you think of how empathy and mirror neurons play in our online connections…and how do they impact the gift economy present in social media?

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